If Richard Simmons Invented a Smartphone App...

Transform Your Resolution Into a Healthy Lifestyle

With the New Year, there are always a series of resolutions (almost) everyone makes and one of the most popular goals out there to lose weight/get healthy. With that in mind, here are a few fitness and dieting apps geared towards helping you keep that resolution past the usual month of January.

Endomondo

Exercising hasn’t been this easy before. Using Endomondo, you can set up whatever kind of exercise you may want to do. The app default is running, but there are a bunch of categories that you can choose from. You can also set a specific workout ranging from basic to a specific goal like a calorie count or beating a friend’s personal best. There’s also a GPS route tracking feature to show you where you’re going.

Accupedo

If you have an old pedometer, throw caution to the wind and throw that old relic away! Thanks to Accupedo, you have the basic functionality of that drab, old pedometer blended with the track ability of a treadmill. This app will tell you how many steps, miles, minutes, mph, and calories you’ve gathered throughout your walking/running experience. With Android, there’s a great widget you can leave on your home screen that will track your steps a day. Not only that, but it also keeps track of all the times you’ve used the app in a chart which ranges between just one day to the whole year. You can even control your music within the app, which access your whole music library stored on your phone.

My Diet Diary

Here’s an app for those folks who are looking for an all-in-one health pick-me-up. With the initial setup, it’ll ask you all the personal information you’d never want to acknowledge i.e. weight, age, activity level, how much weight you want to lose, etc. All of this ends up helping in the long run.

There are a couple different sections to this app so I’ll break it down a bit.

Food

All of your information’s rounded up into one location with a set calorie goal for the day. Just below, there is a button for food. When in this section, you can break down every little thing you’ve eaten for the day. To make life easier, considering many people tend not to make every single food item from scratch, there’s a barcode scanner to scan items, like that Lean Cuisine meal you ate for lunch yesterday. When you're done, it will automatically subtract from your main calorie intake for the day.

Exercise

Just like with the food section, you can manually enter in your exercise for the day. The app will give you a list of different exercises from basketball and biking to swimming and yoga. Choose one and enter in the amount of time you’ve put in and it’ll give you a calorie burned number. This number will add to the amount of calories you're allotted for the day.

Weight loss is a very tricky goal that everyone wants to keep, but many find tricky. Once you learn how to eat healthy yet satiating food and get a tolerable amount of exercise, you can turn your “January diet” into a “healthy way of life” so you can stop having to resolve to diet every New Year.

COMMENTS

Don't forget about myfitnesspal. I've been using it since June and have lost over 40lbs. I even only gained 1 lb from a week long trip to disney and over the holidays from splurging. I quickly lost it with the help from this application.

I like it because there's enough people on I who. When you search for the food, have put in all the nutritional information. I also like how it remembers recent foods and you can save favourite items or meals you eat more frequently.

i think the best part is that you can add friends and can show support for what you do. When you add them they can see your updates and diaries. This way if they see you haven't used the app in 3 days you can get encouragement from friends. Theoretically you can also eat what you want but